Sunday, August 24, 2008

Like most teachers on the planet--or at least in these parts--I spent last week frantically trying to organize my room and plan for the upcoming school year in the moments provided between attending meetings, learning how to bond with my fellow teacheroos and setting goals.

While at these meetings, we got to watch several nifty little PowerPoints along with nifty little YouTube videos. Don’t you just love those videos? I do.

Jeez, I’d love to show nifty little YouTube videos to help keep my kiddos engaged, but sadly I do not have the keys to enter the YouTube video kingdom where all is nifty and fan-tab-u-lous.

No Siree, not me.

Try as I might, St. Bernard, our school’s Internet gatekeeper, blocks me. No YouTube video kingdom keys for me. No Siree. I couldn’t watch Mr. Teacher’s rather fab-u-lous rendition of Darth Vader explaining the Pythagorean Theorem on YouTube no matter how hard I try.

Nope. No can do. And if you’re reading this from your school, you probably can’t go there either.

Try accessing that at your school. Nuh-uh. Sorry. No can do. The watcher of all that is Internet will not allow access.

So much for the free flow of ideas. I’m down to a trickle here. I bet you are too. It’s enough to make you think you’re in China. Hey, maybe Chinese spies created Internet blockers.

Now, I could request access from my tech guy buddies, but with our tech guys opening up two campuses and troubleshooting all the computer scheduling problems etc. that surface at the start of the school year, I didn’t because (1) I really, really do like our tech guys and I didn’t want to bother them and add to their stress, and (2) I know this request isn’t that important so it probably stands as much of a chance (at this point in time) as this guy.

So in the meantime until things settle down, I guess shadow puppets will have to suffice.

And if you don’t think I’ll do that, well then my friends, you don’t know me well at all.

13 comments:

RealPlayer allows me to download youtube videos. You could just put them on a thumb drive and show them off of that. If they're good I like to download them anyway, you never know how long something is going to be on youtube.

We can't get YouTube either of course (but you can download a YouTube video and then replay on Real Player IF you have it on your school computer).

But for us, they (upon high) keep saying we need to USE the technology but then I want to make a department calendar in Outlook (which we use) and can I do it myself? No.

Can our school site tech guy do it? No.

I had to petition via my principal to the District Office where they will decide if I can make a department calendar just like the ones we already use for things like computer lab availability for my own department so we can coordinate using our science equipment.

If they REALLY wanted us to USE technology they wouldn't micromanage our use of it and would treat us as the adults we are capable of making good decisions.

Try Google Video. That usually isn't blocked at school (I have the same You Tube problema you have at WSHS, and if I want to show a YT video, I have to take my laptop home and download it there), and they often have many of the same videos as You Tube. BTW, don't forget it's Sunday, and you know what THAT means--S4 is underway today!

You can also use this website http://keepvid.com/ to download videos from YouTube & then play them in whatever player you've got at school. I use this for stuff quite a bit, as youtube's blocked at my school too. I just save it to a flashdrive & take it to school with me.

I download using ZillaTube and then take my flash drive to school. Also, try TeacherTube.com. The content is created and uploaded by teachers, and it's not blocked at my school (like everything else is).

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